Last month I sent Darin Strauss a copy of Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori after he overpaid for his part of a cab ride home from a party. In return, he introduced me to the Essential Stories of V.S. Pritchett. And then, poking around online, he discovered that Pritchett (pictured) had once written an introduction to an edition of Memento Mori. . . .
Fannie Farmer’s Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent and Robin Bellinger’s “Feed a Fever, Starve a Cold” inspired my latest New York Times Magazine mini-column. Sometimes (rarely, but sometimes) when you’re sick you need something other than a hot toddy.
At Bookslut, Elizabeth Bachner wonders “whether, on average, people are lonelier in real life than in novels.”
“Lost things have their own special category. So long as they’re lost, and felt to be lost, they belong to the imagination and live more vividly than before. They make a mystery.” — Sven Birkerts, The Other Walk. Birkerts’ best personal essays are steeped in an anxious nostalgia that is, in intensity if not in focus, all too familiar to . . .